


Essential Components

by Masu_Trout



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: First Kiss, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Self-Discovery, tomato in the mirror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-18
Updated: 2018-06-18
Packaged: 2019-05-17 23:11:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14840990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: The Institute's been keeping more secrets than anyone knew. Nate had a mission, a family to rescue, an identity. Now he's not even sure who he really is.Nick's probably not the best person to help with that, but he might well be the only one who can.





	Essential Components

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Allekha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allekha/gifts).



> Hope you enjoy! I had a lot of fun writing this.

Nate was sitting on the front stoop of his ramshackle Sanctuary home, head in his hands and staring down at nothing, the very portrait of human misery.

Or, well, not human. Not exactly.

The thought sent another twist of confusion and denial flooding through Nick. As often as he called himself _old bot_ or _synth_ , as comfortable as he'd become with knowing another man's life had made him who he was today, as much at peace as he was with what he saw in the mirror... that was him. He'd had a hundred years to wrap his head around his own screwed-up existence and sometimes it still left him angry and confused.

Nate was different: a relic of a long-lost age, guided by a moral compass whose true-north pointed towards a genuine desire to help others. One of the most open and honest and uncomplicated men Nick had ever known. He shouldn't have to deal with—with _this_.

Nick hesitated a moment in the doorway, watching Nate watch the drought-dry scrub. He didn't want to move. Nate had handed him the files, even knowing what they said. It wasn't an invasion of his privacy to know this about him. And yet it sure as hell felt like one. Nick had never tried hiding his nature (not for long, anyway, the old 'Ghoul with the mange' trick could only get a man so far), but for most synths out here secrecy was a matter of life or death. Let the wrong person know you had some wires rigged up in your head and last thing you'd feel was someone putting a bullet through it. Detective that he was, he couldn't always help knowing, but he tried to stay ignorant as much as possible. Being the most obvious synth for hundreds of miles around and a snoop by trade besides meant he was the target for a lot of shady sorts looking for blackmail material or worse.

Damn it all. Nick sighed, grabbed at his trusty pack of cigarettes before sliding it back into his pocket. As much as he wanted the calm, it wasn't the time for one. Someone had to say something. Preferably before Nate managed to slide even deeper into the pit of self-hatred he was clearly digging for himself right now.

(Nate had to know what he was risking, letting anyone at all know. He'd done enough for the Railroad to have seen the danger firsthand. He could've burned the papers up right there at the kitchen counter, taken the secret to his grave and been safer for it. And yet he'd decided to show them to Nick.)

Nick took a step forward, letting the creak of the rotten wood announce his presence, and sat down next to Nate with a rustle of cloth and metal. "Hey there."

He wanted to reach out to him, but hesitated. Nate had no such qualms; he just slid slowly sideways until his shoulder was brushed up against Nick's. "Hey," he said back, and then, miserably, like the words were being ripped out of him, "I'm such an _idiot_."

Nick blinked, startled. That sure wasn't where he'd expected the conversation to start. "You're not. Don't be ridiculous. No one could have guessed."

"Anyone could have!" Nate dug his hands into his thighs so tight that he had to be leaving a bruise. "Dozens in that vault and I'm the only one whose pod makes it through? Two hundred years as an icicle and I'm walking and talking the moment I wake up? I mean, god, do I ever even listen to myself speak?"

"You do remember you're talking to a pre-war detective uploaded into a robot, don't you?" Nick asked. 

Not for the first time, he found himself loathing Father with a battery-acid-sharp intensity. Except Father was Shaun and Shaun was Father and Shaun was a little boy locked away in the Institute's sterile white world, all of it twisted together into one massive knot of betrayal and confusion like the world's cruelest practical joke.

(Nate had explained it all to him like it _was_ a joke, smiling when he told him what he'd seen within the Institute's walls. How his own son had all along been the monster he'd wanted to destroy. He'd wanted to hold Nate, then. He wanted to hold him even more right now.)

More surprisingly, he was furious with the Railroad too. Nick didn't always agree with their methods—when memories were all you had of yourself, what could be crueler than wiping them away?—but he never denied they did important work. None of this was on them. Not their fault they'd managed to pull encrypted records from the Institute's files. Not their fault Nate had offered to decode them. And not their fault Nate's own name had been on one of the many lists, right there in the fuzzy black and white of a stolen and copied print-out.

 _C4-76. AKA Nate Pendleton. Created by request of the Director; body designed and memories implanted based on recovered cryogenic specimen._ Below that, a list of clinically-described wounds: which scars to be recreated on the synthetic body and which to be ignored, how the scientists had worked around the challenge of memory-copying from thawed tissue and around the bullets found in the genetic donor's chest and head. The pride shone easily through the impersonal language.

Father'd wanted a father of his own, it seemed. And with his long-dead at the hands of the Institute's own mercenary, he'd had no qualms about re-creating himself one.

"You know..." Nick said, suddenly feeling helpless under the weight of it all, "You know you're still the same person to me, right? No different than you were twenty minutes ago." 

What was he supposed to say in a situation like this? No one had ever talked him through any of it, back when he was brand-new and stumbling horror-struck through the wastes of his home city in a body made of plastic and steel. Hell, he'd probably had an advantage over Nate in that; one look down had done a damn fine job disabusing him of any notions he might've had of being the original Nick Valentine, no matter what his memories told him. Hard to argue with that much grey.

Nate snorted. "Yeah. No different. Just a little bit less deluded." He turned his hands palm-up and flexed them slowly, watching his fingers curl and relax. "You know, sometimes I meet a synth with their memories wiped, and I can't help but think... _really?_ You grew up in Diamond City and you don't know anyone who lived there? You can't remember your own mother's name? You were a caravan guard for ten years and you can't shoot a pipe pistol straight?" Nate grew more animated as he spoke. "I never understood how they could be so in denial. The cognitive dissonance, I thought it would have to be too much at some point. And here I am with a story crazier than any of theirs and I never had a fucking clue." 

"Nate..."

"I never held my son. Never ran my fingers through my wife's hair." He laughed miserably, lifted his hands to show his empty palms to Nick. "The man who did is rotting in a medical waste bin somewhere in the Institute."

Nick took a deep breath, steadying himself—a habit stolen from the original Nick—and reached out to intertwine his fingers with Nate's. Mismatched rusted-metal-and-synthetic-grey curled around a pair of the Institute's finest manufactured flesh and blood. "These might not have done all the things you remember. But they opened the door of my cell right when I was wondering if I'd ever see the sun again. Shot a deathclaw through the eye at thirty paces. Worked crops out of radioactive ground with nothing but hard work and a whole lot of luck." 

As he spoke he traced the rough callouses, the faded lines of sunburn, the fine pitted scars left behind by shrapnel. The Institute was either too lazy to recreate detail that fine or too proud to implement such small imperfections; smooth hands were one of the tells for freshly-escaped synths. All of the marks here were ones Nate had earned himself.

For a while Nate just looked at him. Nick couldn't even begin to guess what he might be feeling. His face had become a mask of stone, more inscrutable even than Nick's limited-range latex skin. Finally, he sighed, and some of the tension seemed to flow out of him with it. "I'm sorry, Nick," he said. "I'm acting as self-centered as it gets, aren't I?" 

"Furthest thing from it," Nick said. It took a special kind of man to call himself selfish while dealing with a bombshell like this. A very special, very stupid kind of man. 

"Yeah," Nate scoffed. "Nothing narcissistic about crying on _your_ shoulder because I'm just so up and upset about being a—a synth." He hesitated a moment on the word, like he was afraid saying it out loud might make it more real. "Maybe next time I head out in a radiation storm I can go whining to Hancock about how terrified I am of becoming a ghoul."

"Right, because all that talk about friendship and partners—that was just me trying to tell you that I wanted you to stay the hell away if you ever had anything eating you up inside, right? Glad you cracked the code." Admittedly, there _had_ been some coded messages on Nick's part tucked away in those talks, but mostly those had been along the lines of _I can't stop staring at you whenever you're not looking_ and _Please tell me you'll keep me around a little while longer_ ; the agency always seemed a touch smaller, a touch emptier, when Nate wasn't around to fill it up with his presence.

After a moment's thought, Nick fumbled back into his coat pocket for the cigarette he'd refused himself earlier. Psychosomatic or not, some topics shouldn't be broached without a bit of nicotine.

His lighter caught ruby-red as he snapped the cracked plastic top open. It was early evening here and so dry that even the air felt thirsty. One of those endless summer stretches without rain that left the world a dull brown and settlers across the Commonwealth scrambling for their water stores. Against the backdrop of the dry scrub, the tiny pinprick flame looked almost impossibly bright. It scared him, sometimes, how easy it would be to drop a cigarette and set the whole town on fire.

"It's tough," he continued, "having to change something about the way you see yourself. Doesn't mean you're being a bigot or a complainer or whatever it is you're trying to beat yourself up for now." Of course, sometimes that pain could tangled up in bigotry— Danse came to mind—but any man who spent as much time rescuing synths as Nate did, who seethed and stewed over insults towards Nick long after Nick himself had forgotten them, deserved a little slack on that front. "Hell, tell Hancock you're worried about becoming a ghoul and he'd probably give you some sympathy. Or at least some Rad-X." Not that Nate had to worry about that anymore.

Nick let the slow realization rattle through his scrap-heap brain as he lit the end of his cigarette and brought it to his lips. Nate wasn't a human. Or, at least, he wasn't an organic human. He'd never grow older; never fall sick; never find himself a nice woman out in the wastes, have another child, die wrinkled and gray and leave Nick mourning at a Sanctuary gravestone. 

Goddamn it. Nick nearly crushed his cigarette between the needle-sharp fingers of his right hand. A little twist of something approaching excitement had hummed through his circuits when he imagined himself a hundred years more in the future and then imagined Nate there beside him. It was sick of him. Twisted. He shouldn't be thinking like this at all, and he especially shouldn't be thinking like this when Nate was right here in front of him panicking. 

_Thinking like what, huh?_ Nick forced himself to confront the half-formed thoughts head-on. A detective who lied to himself was useless, after all. _Like you've got something in common now? Like maybe he'd be interested after all, if you're the only option he's got that won't up and die on him after sixty-odd years?_

Back then, standing over the corpse of Eddie Winters with blood drying tacky under his shoes and in a splash of arterial spray across the sleeve of his coat, he'd had half a mind to proposition Nate right then and there. If everything else hadn't already sent him head-over-heels, seeing his worst nightmare cold and dead on the ground would have done it in a heartbeat. He'd considered it, and then considered whether Nate would want some tattered old thing begging for his affections, and kept his fool mouth closed.

He was regretting that now. Had been regretting it for a while, even as he was too cowardly to fix it. Nick wasn't sure whether it was because he wanted the inevitable rejection out of the way or if he actually thought Nate might say yes (God, _please_ ). Either way, it would be easier. No more _what if_ hanging over his head like the Sword of Damocles.

Still. Now wasn't at all the right time for it, he thought, and pulled his cigarette from his mouth just in time for Nate to cup his face between warm hands, pull him in, and kiss him.

"Mmph," Nick said. His thoughts were hovering right around the level of _mmph_ too. 

Nate's lips were soft against his, his hands were cautious and gentle. He kissed Nick like he was afraid of breaking him. Perhaps he had broken Nick, because his mind was stuck on the sensation of Nate's warm body against his and completely unable to process anything else. Like, for example, how this could be happening, or why, or whether someone'd shoved him in a chair at the Memory Den when he wasn't looking and decided to mess with his head some more.

After a moment of Nick sitting there, stock-still, like a clock with its spring run down, Nate pulled back. "Sorry," he said. His hands dropped back down to his sides as quick as if he'd been burned. It was all Nick could do not to grab them and press them up to his face again. "I... fuck. Sorry. I shouldn't have—goddamn it."

He was sliding away now, legs tensed up underneath him like he might up and run, and before Nick had even thought it through properly he was grabbing at Nate's wrist to hold him in place.

Both of them froze. 

"Wait," Nick said. "What was that about?"

"It was about me being a fucking idiot, it is what it was." Nate sighed and ran his free hand through his unkempt hair, messing it up even worse. 

"That's not much of an answer."

"It wasn't much of a question," Nate retorted. A moment later he grimaced, looking guilty. "No. I'm sorry. You're right. Look, I just... I just thought that, if everything was already going to hell, I ought to at least stop being such a coward about"—he hesitated a moment, caught on something he wasn't willing to say—"how I feel. But that's not fair to you. You're a better friend than I could ever ask for, and I don't want to ruin that." The way he was looking at Nick told Nick he thought he already had.

Part of Nick wanted to laugh. Part of him wanted to get mad at Nate for not telling him sooner, and how hypocritical was that? At least Nate had said something. At least he'd made a move, however ill-timed and clumsy, instead of putting it off again and again.

Most of Nick just wanted to kiss him.

"And if I don't think you'd be ruining anything?" He traced a line along Nate's cheek with his flesh-coated hand, pressed his thumb gently against Nate's lips.

Nate said, "Nick."

When Nick leaned in to kiss him, Nate made a desperate little noise in the back of his throat and wrapped his hands around his shoulders. 

It felt strange. He hadn't done this since Jenny, which really meant he'd never done this at all, and Nick had never realized just how different it might be to his ancient stolen memories. His mouth was so much drier than Nate's and he kept having to adjust his hands to check and make sure he wasn't gouging pinprick holes in Nate's skin. And yet it wasn't any less perfect for it—Nate's wandering fingers mapped out the ragged tears in Nick's face and neck without any hint of disgust, his pulse beat quick and desperate against Nick's fingers, and when Nick deepened the kiss a little Nate actually moaned for him.

He hadn't hoped for this. Hadn't so much as dared. He'd _wanted_ it, though, and the reality of it was better than he could have imagined. When Nate finally broke the kiss, panting quietly with his lips a hair's-breadth from Nick's, it was all Nick could do not drag him back in for another round.

"I," Nate said, "okay. So. That's new."

"New? If I told you how long I'd been wanting to do that for, I'd embarrass us both."

The look Nate gave him then was so intent and focused that it sent a shiver down Nick's spine. " _Really_. You could give me a hint, if you wanted."

Since Eddie would be the easy answer, but it had been going on even before then. That was just the first time he'd not been able to deny to himself what the little thrill down the back of his spine when Nate smiled at him meant. "How about you go first?"

Now it was Nate's turn to wear the radstag-in-headlights look. "Uh."

Well, if that didn't just make a person more curious. He wasn't cruel, though, so he just let his hand linger a moment on Nate's thigh and asked, "Just... you're sure, though, right?" 

"What?"

"Wouldn't be the first time someone did something, ah, _sudden_ because they'd gotten a bit of news they weren't sure what to do with."

Drinking, drugs, suicide attempts, homicide attempts... trying to fuck another synth wouldn't even be close to the worst reaction Nick had ever seen to sudden synthy self-discovery. Didn't mean it wouldn't hurt, though, to get caught up in that.

"Jesus, no." Nate shook his head emphatically. "There's a hell of a lot of things I'm confused about right now, don't get me wrong. But this isn't one of them."

Those things would come crashing back down on them soon enough, Nick knew. Father would know, eventually, that his little expeworse riment knew the truth about himself, and Nick couldn't imagine the man taking kindly to anything that strayed from his plan. And Nate—hell, Nate would be hurting a lot about this soon; it got harder each time you passed something you remembered and then realized _you_ didn't really remember it at all.

That was a problem for tomorrow, though. Stupid of him, maybe, but he wanted to help Nate push that pain back for as long as he possibly could. Right now there was peace in the low rustle of the wind through the grass and the settlement's distant noises. 

"Good," he said. "And—same." Nick wrapped an arm around him and drew him in.

This time Nate didn't pull away. He relaxed, slowly, like he'd forgotten how his body worked when it wasn't wound tight with stress, and let Nick pull him closer.


End file.
